Regarding Chris Galvin's "One more time, but with *feeling*, guys" at
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/011112/hsm038_1.html
but only after other key players started singing without him, it seems--
I wrote:
> > (If there's a wolf swimming in this ocean of wool,
> > my bet is on Nokia.)
And Tony Chan responded:
> I would never be one to bet against Michael and in this case, he is
almost,
> nearly, certainly right.
Too true. I'm moving out of the Vatican next week, into nicer digs.
> In addition to the "industry-wide" announcement that started this thread,
> Nokia, a day earlier, signed a deal with Sony to work on, you guessed it,
a
> platform for the wireless Internet. Almost in the same breathe, Nokia
decided
> to license components of their technology, including things like their MMS
and
> SMS clients, WAP/XHTML browser and a SyncML-based synchronization engine,
as
> well as a semi-propriatery implementation of the Symbian platform in a
device
> reference design called, Series 60.
OK, so the Motorola press release might be no more than an attempt to run
out in front of the real leaders after all. I feel so...vindicated. (Or
maybe "out of touch", compared to Tony here.)
(Or maybe it's the other way around; who can tell with these things?)
> If you read between the lines (or between the different press
announcements in
> this case), you get a message that goes something like this: We are all
for
> industry standard. Oh by the way, we have some standards here and we are
> willing to make it the industry standard, for a price of course.
This could work, though.
An analogy: once upon a time, microcomputer OSes came down to CP/M ("open" ,
or licensed anyway), Apple (proprietary), plus cats and dogs. IBM decided
to weigh into the microcomputer market, and Microsoft, by lying with
near-aerobic intensity--a heavy-breathing specialty of theirs ever
since--capitalized on IBM's move by offering to license IBM a CP/M-86
quasi-clone that MS didn't even have on hand at the time.
As Bill put it to them, so eloquently: "It's called...DOS." Always thinking
on his feet, that kid.
This whopper basically re-architected the cosmos. Three stars lined up in
the firmament:
1. a heavyweight hardware maker....
2. making a commitment to open hardware specs....
3. and settling on a nearly-standard OS API.
You can't get the analogy to fit, of course. Symbian isn't Microsoft, nor
is it the tiny starving company that Microsoft bought DOS from
(for--what?--$7,000 dollars?); Nokia is big but it's not the IBM of
handsets; and DoCoMo is neither Microsoft nor IBM.
The lesson is there though: simplify the relationships (which consortia
never do--quite the contrary), limit the core relationship to players that
don't compete; then--and only then--make competitive markets for other
players with your commitments to openness. Then it won't even matter that
the software platform isn't quite ready yet. People will believe. DOS
wasn't ready for prime-time even when it was released. Arguably, DOS died
without ever being ready. It never mattered. If the television network
only has one channel, and Bozo the Clown is on at 6:30, you watch Bozo or
you don't watch TV.
Now all they need is a shipping date for BozOS, and we're set for
a....a....can the Pope say, "a paradigm shift in global wireless telecoms"?
Sure he can. He's the Pope.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
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Received on Thu Nov 15 14:11:27 2001